Last week, the New York Times published its list of the 100 greatest movies of the 21st century so far, with Parasite taking the #1 spot. And this week, Rolling Stone ran a similar piece, with There Will Be Blood leading the pack.
I love lists like this, as arbitrary as they are — not only because they’re snapshots of our ever-shifting cultural consensus but because they inspire you to generate your own list in your head. The 2000s were formative for me, so of course I had to agonize over my own top 10 of the last 25 years. Here are my picks, in alphabetical order.
Adaptation was Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s exhilarating follow-up to Being John Malkovich. It’s another painfully funny nesting-doll movie, with Kaufman inserting himself into a screenplay about the anxieties and vulnerabilities of writing a screenplay.
Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain was a cultural watershed when it was released in 2005, and it remains a classical drama. Its tragic story of 1960s cowboys who fall in love while carrying on their straight domestic lives is still a bold reframing of American machismo.
My favorite of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 21st-century work is the fragmentary epic The Master. It has extraordinary performances from Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a self-imposed svengali and Joaquin Phoenix as the devoted disciple who nearly blows his belief system apart.
The late David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. began life as a rejected TV pilot, resurrected as a hallucinatory mystery that floats through the Hollywood dream machine. Haunted, elliptical, erotic, scary — it refuses to define itself all these years later.
No Country for Old Men, adapted by the Coen brothers from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is about as perfect as movies get. It’s a screw-tightening thriller and a meditation on aging and death, about men pursued across the desert by ruthless irony and the ravages of time.
Pan’s Labyrinth is Guillermo del Toro’s most gruesome and wondrous historical fairy tale, in which a young girl disappears into a grotesque fantasy world to escape the real horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
One of the most beautiful movies ever made, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma felt like the culmination of his career up to that point. It’s a dreamy picaresque about life in 1970s Mexico and a cutting commentary on the social divides between an indigenous maid and her middle-class employers.
Wes Anderson’s now-unmistakable style burst forth in 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, still his best and funniest portrait of a broken family. It’s meticulously designed, of course, but it still has a grubby, lively authenticity about it.
The definitive film of its era, David Fincher’s Facebook origin story The Social Network is a chilling, incisive and thrillingly made portrait of the toxic personalities that have thrived at the expense of the rest of us.
And finally, the Safdie brothers closed out the 2010s with their streetwise Uncut Gems, a restless, breakneck New York crime odyssey anchored by a masterfully sleazy Adam Sandler performance.
This is only scratching the surface, and I had dozens more titles I treasure — including Moonlight, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Banshees of Inisherin, Lady Bird and The Tree of Life. Regardless of the final 10, it was nice to be reminded of just how many great movies we’ve gotten in the last 25 years.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 here on KPBX.